Page:The life and times of King Edward VII by Whates, Harry Richard 1.djvu/39

21 OVERTURES TO SOPHIA 21 our purpose. The Electress is the chief figure upon which attention should be directed. Anne was tepid about the Hanoverian succession. Her thoughts were with the exiled half-brother, living in dependence and unhappiness abroad. She consented to the appearance of the name of the Electress in the Prayer Book, but she disapproved of a proposal made in Parliament to grant an annual allow- ance to Sophia, which that Princess did not want and would not have. Nor would the Queen invite her to visit England, though she created her husband Duke of Cambridge, and gave him the Garter. In 1705 an Address was voted in the Commons, but thrown out by the Lords, asking that the Electress be in- vited to take up her residence in England. This manoeuvre failing, a Bill was passed conferring naturalisation upon the Elec- tress. She thus became legally an English- woman. A further Bill empowered her to appoint Lords Justices to carry on the Government with the officers of the Crown during such time as she might be out of England at the death of Anne. A deputation was sent to her at Hanover to acquaint her with these measures. A few years later her heir was made a Knight of the Garter. Thus things went on, the chances of the Hanoverian succession fluctuating with the varying fortunes of party warfare in Eng- lish Court and Parlia- ment, but on the whole improving steadily, c* With the failure of the Queen's health in 1713, there came a crisis. The star of the Pretender seemed to be in the ascendant. There was a glamour about him which the Electoral Prince did not possess. The more that was learned of George Lewis the less was he liked. The English nation was not puritanically vir- tuous in the reign of Anne, and in personal affairs its attitude was widely tolerant ; but the unhappy story of Sophia Dorothea, the wife who herself had erred, in common with a husband notorious for his mistresses, and whose after life was spent in confine- ment at Ahlden, did not commend him to popular favour. It was common report George Lewis never troubled to conceal the fact that he cared little whether or no he became King of England. The Pretender might have had the reversion of the throne at this juncture had he abandoned his Catholicism ; but this he declined to do. On the other hand, the Protestantism of George Lewis was unim- peachable, at least, in the political sense ; and there seemed no other solution of THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT OF THE PERIOD.